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This chapter interrogates two sets of terms, two notions, or two practices that are deployed across Derrida's great essay ‘Plato's Pharmacy’ – the terms/notions/practices of composition and displacement. Beyond this proposal to isolate and read a few fragments of ‘Plato's Pharmacy’, it also attempts to gather enough momentum from this selective reading to execute a leap beyond that essay and land closer to the other end of Derrida's oeuvre, traversing thereby what is now often referred to as the division between his early and late work. The point of the exercise is to bring to bear at least...

This chapter interrogates two sets of terms, two notions, or two practices that are deployed across Derrida's great essay ‘Plato's Pharmacy’ – the terms/notions/practices of composition and displacement. Beyond this proposal to isolate and read a few fragments of ‘Plato's Pharmacy’, it also attempts to gather enough momentum from this selective reading to execute a leap beyond that essay and land closer to the other end of Derrida's oeuvre, traversing thereby what is now often referred to as the division between his early and late work. The point of the exercise is to bring to bear at least one or two more reasons to resist such narratives and to be wary of the figural substitution of chronology or biography for an entirely different ‘logic’ that does not necessarily unfold according to the commonly referenced temporal order.